What we do

As a team, we are purely and simply committed to one central theme: to preserve the human spirit by providing a compassionate, professional, safe, supportive care for people living through the turmoil that accompanies a life-threatening diagnosis and its medical treatment.

We have been pioneering the importance of holistic, integrated support for patients with life-challenging illnesses for over 15 years. We are part of an important movement that places compassion in medicine at the heart of what we do.

As part of our vision we provide an award winning team of professional and dedicated therapists. Full Circle therapists are a team of highly skilled and qualified practitioners many of whom also hold additional qualifications in nursing, physiotherapy or specialist training.

To understand how we can best support our patients – as individuals – through their often long and rigorous medical treatments, we regularly undertake service evaluations this is to ensure we always remain close to the need of our patients.

To expand the reach of our service we work with some of the very best, like-minded professors, consultants, senior nurses and researchers in the UK and and internationally. Research is very important to our vision as it really can make a difference but to do it we need your help. You can support us in a number of ways.

Why we do it

For a tiny, traumatised baby in intensive care who has just received another painful medical procedure, to be soothed within minutes by the nurturing therapy of one of our Full Circle therapists is invaluable. For that therapist to teach the parents how to help soothe their child provides them with another vital skill to maintain the essential bond between child and parent.

There is growing evidence that supportive therapy interventions such as infant massage for hospitalised babies and reflexology, massage therapy or relaxation training for patients with cancer and chronic pain has a positive impact on symptom relief, improving the ability of very sick patients to cope with the distress and anxiety of their illness.

Clinical treatment is one part of the response to a serious illness, but can often make a person feel worse before they start to feel better. At a time when it feels that so much has been taken away, supportive therapies can provide the positive counterbalance that keeps a person feeling human. By completing the full circle of support through these and other approaches, we can help people find the strength they need to deal with the challenges of serious illness.

How we started

In 2000 Full Circle’s founder Suzanne Ruggles was asked by a senior haematology and bone marrow transplant nurse at St George’s Hospital to develop a supportive therapy service for leukaemia and transplant patients.
In those days there was no support for haematology patients who were in isolation rooms for weeks and often months at a time coping with chemotherapy and its side-effects, radiation and bone marrow transplants.

Suzanne very quickly saw it was urgently needed to expand the service to include another patient group whose inherited pain condition is both life-threatening from birth and incurable. With the early support of haematology consultant Dr David Bevan and Professor of haematology Dr Ted Gordon-Smith, Suzanne developed one of the UK’s leading supportive therapy programmes.

In 2005 and in recognition of her work she won the St George’s NHS Healthcare Trust’s Exceptional Award for establishing a therapy service that “provides an exceptional example of supporting patient quality of life at St George’s Hospital”. The next year Suzanne was asked to develop a service for paediatric medicine. To meet the growing demand and as a stepping stone to being an independent charity Suzanne founded Full Circle Fund within the Hospital Charity before finally launching Full Circle Fund Therapies as an independent charity in 2015.